I hate having to unlock characters in fighters!

So In all this hype of SF4 I keep hearing about having to unlock characters and I really wish they'd stop doing crap like that in games. When I buy a fighting game I only get it for one thing and that is to play it against friends. They never have great single player modes and all unlocking things comes down to a stupid grind of having to beat the AI over and over again in some repetitive grind. I mean if they did it like COD4 where you have to rank up online and then you unlock new weapons or ins treet fighters case new characters then that would be ok but the current way is so boring.

Theres always that disappointment of buying the game and wanting to play all the characters with your friends and only having access to a few of them. I remember Tekken or something doing that when I was a kid and instead of playing it just made us all go...... screw this.

I always liked it when I was younger and had more free time. Makes you have to learn all the characters decently and sometimes the endings were interesting.

Then again, I also came of age in the era of game enhancers and, if I ever got lazy, I could cheat my way through.

Sometimes it is annoying. 

Just set the game to easy and only one round.
Yea it can be a pain, especially when some of the locked charters are the ones I really want to play.